Forza Horizon 2 Reviews
'Forza Horizon 2' has delivered an over the top, open world hit for the Xbox One.
This feels less like a review and more like a love letter to Forza Horizon 2. This game was an absolute joy to review, and I'll play it long after this article goes live. Like opening the hood on a Ferrari, Forza Horizon 2 is filled from fender to fender with absolute awesome.
The game's only issues are minor – a reliance on a race discipline it doesn't quite master, and the fact that it really only builds on what we knew from the first game without ever striking out too far on its own. The Horizon offshoot has unshackled the Forza franchise, letting it run free into the wild, and this new adventure ensures that we don't take that freedom for granted.
There's no great revolution here and it occasionally lacks for visual variety and challenge, but Horizon 2 earns its stripes with a breezy determination to simply show you a ruddy good time.
This is about as good as open-world driving gets.
Forza Horizon 2 picks up where the first game finished, and improves on just about every area. The FM5 engine produces some absolutely stunning graphics, which is matched in equal parts by the audio and sounds of the cars. The world is as open as it can be and leaves the players to drive and race wherever they want. Add to this all of the single-player events, multiplayer races, co-op events, road trips, and car clubs, and this is a mammoth package of pure petrolhead pleasure. The festival atmosphere is felt throughout the game. It is fun from start to finish. Due to its diversity and replayability, it's hard to say what more you could want from such a title. In short, following in the tire treads of its predecessor, this could well be the racing game of 2014.
Forza Horizon 2 is just about everything you would expect from an already superb game upgraded and moved to a stronger platform. While it's disappointing that higher end driving rigs still can't be used, the quality of the game and the Xbox One's controller ease the pain just a bit. This one is well worth the 100+ hours it will take to work your way through.
Forza Horizon 2 easily records a podium finish ahead of what is going to be a busy winter for the racing genre.
Forza Horizon 2 is a fantastic racing game, probably the best released so far in this short-lived generation of consoles. Xbox One owners should definitely check it out. The amount of content is impressive, but even more impressive is that most of it is really fun to play. Horizon 2 starts off a laundry list of exclusive titles for MS, we can only hope the rest are as excellent as Playground's latest racer.
Forza Horizon 2 is a great looking game. The southern European setting is gorgeous and provides a variety of roads and settings to race on. The presentation is slick all the way through, and the six radio stations ensure you'll always have something to listen to (even if they aren't quite as stellar as those in the first Horizon, which I still listen to regularly).
If you are an Xbox One owner and looking for a racing game that is an open world, fun, and has a lot of replayability while being both accessible to beginners and a challenge racing veterans given the number of gameplay options, then you really shouldn't look any further then Forza Horizon 2.
Importing the graphics and physics engines of the Forza saga into an open-world arcade racing game was an idea already well exploited in the first installment, but this return to Xbox One with Forza Horizon 2 definitely drives home the point with a next- achievement.
Review in French | Read full review
Forza Horizon 2 enriches the game formula of its predecessor with a structure able to mix very well offline and online elements, old and unpublished, confirming once again as one of the most balanced cross between arcade racing and simulation.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Perfection is not of this world, but fun is, and Forza Horizon 2 comes with that in spades.
The first Horizon was hailed as one of the best racing titles on the Xbox 360, and its sequel just raises the bar. As an arcade or simulation racer, there's not that much that Forza Horizon 2 does wrong. This shouldn't even be a question for racing fanatics, and I'll easily recommend it to every other Xbox owner out there.
Easily one of the best racing experiences in this generation of games to date, Forza Horizon 2 improves upon the greatness of the original, while opening up a plethora of fun through Xbox Live as well. You won't be sorry hitting the road with this one.
[Y]ou're always doing something, and there's always something to do in this game. Let's just hope that there's ever-faster cars and ever-more stuff to destroy on the horizon with this series.
Bigger doesn't always equate to better. Forza Horizon 2 definitely delivers a gameplay experience a step above its predecessor, but gutting story mode leaves the single-player soulless and more akin to a grind.
If you love racing games, Forza Horizon 2 is a must. In fact, it's so good that it's worth buying a new console for.
Horizon 2 is a wheel that has not so much been reinvented as polished to perfection. Whilst comparable to other open-world racers such as Burnout Paradise and Test Drive Unlimited, it takes the genre to a new level.